I'm a C# developer having worked with .Net since it was in beta. Before that I mainly worked in C and C++. I have been developing commercial software for more than 20 years. I also mess around with microprocessors, but that's just for fun. I live near Cambridge, England and work from home in my 'silicon shed'.

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I said before that I might try and do some unit testing in C, rather than use the features in Visual Studio.
It would mean that for H2D2 I can do everything inside Pelles C and won't need to have two IDEs running.
But I've never done any unit testing in C before (at least if I have it was so long ago I've forgotten).
So I needed to go off and find some means of doing that.

So I found the libtap library which is a
unit testing framework for C programs. Well, it is something that implements the Test Anything Protocol
which you can read about here. I'm no
expert on the Test Anything Protocol, this is the first time I've used it, but for my purposes it looks
like it will do fine. As long as I can run code and check for expected results and have the Passes and Failures
shown in some sort of output then I'll be happy... But for the moment
it looks ideal. I've had to make some minor modifications to get it working in my project
(in Pelles C for Windows) but it was not very much effort really. I've just made my own version of
tap.c and included it in my project. I had to include an implementation of vasprintf() which I
found
here
rather than rolling my own, but that seems to work quite well for me.

I found libtap after searching for C unit testing on
stack overflow
in case you're wondering how I found it in the first place.

What I've ended up with is a #define which tells the compiler which version of
main() to include. One version is my usual code and the other runs my test suite. I haven't
began porting my actual H2D2 unit tests back over from C# yet, but I do have a trivial example running just to
check that I can run some unit tests. So this this is all I've got so far:

I've also set it up so that the content of tap.c is not included when I compile normally, so this means
that my code isn't bloated with the test framework when I'm not using it.

I've resisted the temptation to mess around with libtap too much, I've only made enough changes to
get it working in my project. Thanks need to go to Nik Clayton, who wrote the library and to whoever
River Tarnell-7 is for posting his vasprintf() implementation. Thanks! In case it
helps any other people using Pelles C who would like to add units tests to their project, here are the files:

I'll probably try this out on the Raspberry Pi soon, because I think it may be useful to have
a lightweight unit testing framework for GCC on the Raspberry Pi too. I'll post an update if anything comes of
that idea.

Since I've been writing the parser for H2D2 - the continuation of my work on DALIS, I thought
that it might be useful to see the syntax trees
that are being generated. So I found a
nifty tool called phpSyntaxTree
which is a website that will draw a graphical version of a tree from bracketed notation.

So I added some code to H2D2 which will output the syntax tree created by the parser in bracketed
notation, and now I can paste the resulting text into phpSyntaxTree and see what the results look like.

Whilst the H2D2 language doesn't have much of a syntax yet, I have been able to parse things like
this example code:

That program tests the majority of things that I have written so far, simple things like branching, expression parsing and assigning numeric variables. This is how that program comes out:

You can see the difference between the two expressions, one with brackets and the other without, and when I run
the program, the first result is 7 and the second result is 9, so it seems to be working fine. When H2D2 programs
are executed I'm using a non-recursive algorithm, which means that the code can be frozen at any point and then
resumed - even if the code was part way through evaluating an expression there's no problem in carrying on exactly
where the code was paused. So far I've only tested all this in Pelles C on Windows, but I will put a quick
makefile together soon so that I can compile it with GCC (on linux), I want to keep the C code for H2D2 as portable as I can. The next thing that I'm going to try and build is a loop, which is kinda important.